Final Presentations for the Semester

I can't believe it's almost the end of the semester already... a couple of more projects and we can stick a fork in it, cuz it's done! :) One of my last projects is to give a one-hour presentation on two books I've read pertaining to the course over the past semester.

My first book is "Head First: HTML with CSS & XHTML" by Elizabeth & Eric Freeman. As far as tutorial books go, this one was almost painless. At first I arched my eyebrow at the word searches and crosswords at the end of each chapter, but, as the authors suggested, it is a great way to give your poor old brain a break after staring at code tutorials for page after page. The authors' writing style is nice and light, too which also helped quite a bit in getting through it. Out of 5, I rate this book at least a 4.5... which is really good for a tutorial book.

The second book I will be presenting is a more recent release titled "The Impulse Economy: Understanding Mobile Shoppers and What Makes Them Buy" by Gary Schwartz. I won't lie -- this book was about as dry as a popcorn fart. Even still, it had a few really good points to make regarding m-commerce and how it should be tackled by marketers and designers in the future... it just took the author over 220 pages to eventually make those few points.

The Impulse Economy is also chock-full of stats regarding m-commerce, the internet, phone usage, commerce trends, and shopping in general. I like statistics, so the book was great for that. The over-use of acronyms (which were not all covered in his mini-glossary of acronyms in the back of the book) was TORTUROUS however! It's as if the author wrote the book for computer technicians and huge marketing firms.

And, maybe I'm just being picky here, what is up with the typos, people?? The book was put out in 2011 and contains stats from the beginning of this year, so it was written, edited and published in less than 11 months. Do you think that maybe next time somebody could actually proof the thing before it gets printed? I don't mind the odd little typo here and there as long as you can figure out what the word was supposed to be, but some of the typos I found could not be resolved contextually at all... I hate having to just skip something I'm reading because I always think that it may have been important.

Truthfully, the only reason why I stuck with this book to do my presentation on was because I didn't have anything else I thought I could read end-to-end in less than a week.